Question

I know Silverlight requires a plug-in download and some enterprises don’t allow it on their computers and it isn’t supported on mobile devices, iPad, etc. Let’s say those are not critical issues for me. Other than that, what would be the considerations for me not to make my social networking site purely Silverlight versus some Silverlight\ASP.NET MVC hybrid or just pure ASP.NET MVC? Also, would there be any significant performance hit due to a high user traffic for the site implemented in pure Silverlight versus ASP.NET MVC?

I know there are a lot of posts on this site comparing Silverlight to ASP.NET MVC, but I haven’t found anything that would give me a definitive answer for this question.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Answer 1

While I tend to like Silverlight as a technology, if you’re doing a social networking site I think you need to aim for the largest audience possible. By choosing Silverlight, you’re restricting your users to those Windows and MacOS users who don’t have poicy restrictions or an irrational hate of Silverlight.

So use ASP.NET MVC.

If however you do choose Silverlight – in theory a pure Silverlight deployment should be faster than an ASP.NET MVC one:

• While you do have the (reasonably large) size of the silverlight app, it shouldn’t change between releases and should be cached by the client.
• You have the advantage that the data transmitted between the client and the webservice it talks to is raw data and not a full page (although that’s a moot point if you’d otherwise be building a javascript-heavy site and transferring JSON dynamically)
• Silverlight forces you to use asynchronous calls, so you don’t get into UI-blocking situations that can make the interaction appear slower.

However the same rules still apply around minimizing the quantity of webservice calls – if you’re always calling a bunch of webservice methods together, consider wrapping them up into one call.

Also if you go too crazy with animations it can be chunky on slower machines.